I see you are mixing up a bit. Atmos and LPCM cannot be replaced one-on-one. Spatial audio and LPCM cannot be combined one-on-one either. Yes, you can fake it, but I was specifically talking about it physical – physical elevation channels. These are not found in the LPCM specification, so they are in fact not usable with the PS5 in games and by “tempest” implementation.
Sony chooses a standard method for audio output, which is LPCM (maximum 7.1). The advantage of LPCM is that it is uncompressed audio, so it is always of higher quality than the compressed variants. The only thing LPCM doesn’t have is height channel, but how many actually have speakers hanging from the ceiling? In the living room, Dolby Atmos is basically a gimmick, as most people use it for speakers that don’t do you much good.
LPCM is a difficult requirement, otherwise nothing will come out of the amplifiers or receiver. They’ll have to, that’s kind of a choice between no audio or LPCM. Of course they support it. I’m specifically mentioning people with devices with higher channels that can be found in almost all modern amplifiers/settings nowadays. Or by reflection from the ceiling. But it is there. Since Atmos can certainly make a huge contribution to the living room if you have height channels (via mirroring or dedicated) and all streaming services support it, almost all modern chains do that and DTS can also do it these days via DTS:X It seems to have value added to me. I also have speakers with Atmos support and the difference is really noticeable to me.
Thus, LPCM is compatible with any amplifier or receiver, so you are not dependent on whether your amplifier supports a specific format such as Dolby True HD or DTS-HD. In addition, LPCM decoding is not required and this is only for the benefit of games. Since the decoding can add an additional delay in the audio (asynchronous between picture and sound), you depend on the decoding speed of the receiver or amplifier.
PS5 and PS4 only send normal DTS. But all this LPCM story has nothing to do with the whole spatio-acoustic story, for which Atmos is very useful. Encoding/decoding from LPCM to something else doesn’t make much difference. It must also be encoded for LPCM channels. Encoding to Dolby Atmos has never caused a lag on the Xbox One, so I don’t quite understand how I got to the myth that the PS5 might suddenly lag.
As far as HDR is concerned, Sony has already opted for HDR10, but you can already see that Dolby Vision adds quite a bit in gaming. With the Series X, it also doesn’t work as well as it should in most games.
Dolby Vision can add a lot, just like HDR10+ because it has dynamic metadata. It may also be the case that it is still in its infancy in terms of implementation. But just like Atmos, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision also differ in terms of hardware.
If you’re talking about spatial audio, 3D audio is nothing new, nor is it a Sony app. It is a standard that has been around for years and has proven itself.
This relates to spatial sound reproduction using all loudspeakers. It won’t work with LPCM7.1, you need at least 7.1.2 or more for that. A limitation that Atmos does not have and does not have on PS5.
So your claim that Sony chooses its own apps is not true, they are in fact just benchmarks that have been proven for a long time.
No, they use standards if they don’t really have another option, as I said, no LPCM audio. They will have to. But the general standards that the whole world embraces like HDR10+, Atmos, etc., they don’t. They came up with an inferior version of that (The Tempest). Very unfortunate if you have hardware that can handle those modern standards.
You would think LPCM is interchangeable between 1 and 1 with Atmos, but that’s completely nonsense. Atmos does more than just control individual speaker channels. Atmos is an object-based audio technology. All your comment is really saying is that you have no idea how Atmos works, you’re just pretending it’s an LPCM equivalent.
